We began this project by conducting research into our target audience by running a small survey with 14 fighting game fans to see how music impacted the way they play video games. Generally, people seemed to think that good music had a lot of influence on the atmosphere of the game they were playing or helped them focus and 86% said they would play a game that connected the two with gameplay mechanics. Some mentioned that they tend to use their own playlists to make the game more intense, and so we decided to focus on using a unique song that would stay interesting, especially since people wouldn't really have a choice but to listen to it to experience the game properly.

I wanted to reward players for hitting combos to a beat, so we also tried to find a song that wasn't too fast, and was predictable enough to reasonably be able to time an attack to. In the end, a friend of our developer offered to make a custom song for our game, which was massively helpful.

We also ran into the issue while prototyping that startup frames made it more difficult to time attacks to a rhythm, so we shortened or removed those frames to make everything feel tighter and more responsive, which of couse in turn made it a much faster paced game and greatly affected the balancing and prediction or "reads" that most fighting games have.